Law & Disorder —

First arrest made in WikiLeaks revenge attacks

A 16-year-old Dutch boy has been arrested for being involved in 4chan's DDoS …

4chan vigilante group Anonymous is used to getting away with its DDoS attacks and other Internet shenanigans, but that's not going to be the case this time around. An arrest has been made in 4chan's revenge attacks on PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard, begun after the companies stopped providing services to WikiLeaks. The first to go down is a Dutch 16-year-old boy, who has been arrested by the Dutch High Tech Crime Team and is being held for interrogation.

The teenager went unnamed by the National Prosecutor, but the team said in an announcement Thursday that the cyberattacks (some of which came out of the Netherlands) "quickly led" investigators to the suspect. In addition to his arrest, the 4channer's computers and other devices were seized.

In addition to the high-profile attacks on the payment processors, Anonymous also made an attempt to take down Amazon after the company kicked WikiLeaks off its servers. That attempt appears to have failed (as did the initial attacks on PayPal), but the group could decide to renew its efforts at any time.

As for the arrested teenager, he has already confessed to being part of the attacks on Visa and MasterCard, according to Dutch authorities. The investigation is ongoing, though, because a larger group is "probably" involved. We're going to go out on a limb and say that a single arrest won't put a stop to the actions of that larger group.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui

143 Reader Comments

I think this is known as "business as usual" in diplomatic circles. Which part of this is a crime?

Crime is less relevant than the political fallout.

Already here in Australia one of the senior ALP (gov't) powerbrokers has been exposed as a US stooge, secretly passing information to the US. This person was key to the recent removal of a serving prime minister, replacing him with someone the US preferred.

Well, that's one way to take the recent leaks. There are other ways to read it (he was just passing on public knowledge, albeit known only to a small group of politicians). Now there are calls for his resignation or sacking. Fair or not, it's a political storm that has to be dealt with.

The people most hurt are the politicians who are seeing their lies, corruption and incompetence exposed. That's a Good Thing - too often lately they're dodging responsibility for their actions by classifying everything as secret or operationally too important to reveal. Well, since we vote for these bozos, I feel comfortable knowing a few things about them. If a few political careers are destroyed, then nothing of value is being lost.

I'm going to take this one step further to try and show that even when only "a few political careers are destroyed", more than that is potentially lost. For the record, I'm not disagreeing with you just expanding.

This is a hypothetical situation, but one that could easily happen. Let's take what's going on in Australia, the way you say it. The politicians there see their political careers in danger. They, like anyone, are going to try and save their jobs. They realize they can't be as frank or as candid in their dealings with the US because what they say in private might not stay secret. They will begin to only say things in private that they wouldn't mind the rest of the world hearing. It becomes more difficult for the US to deal with Australia, or any other nation whose politicians suddenly aren't so open with the US. It becomes more difficult for the US to conduct diplomacy. That's a bad thing, and much more than just "a few political careers being destroyed".

So US diplomacy suffers. I know you see this as a bad thing, but since a lot of US diplomacy consists of "do this or else" I can't help but think that might improve the world a bit. Certainly any agreements between our countries heavily favour yours, even when the US pretends to champion free trade (ha! let me sell you sugar, meat and undercut your farmers in a free market instead of playing against your taxpayer supported agricultural sector which politicians of all stripes fear to open to actual competition).

If the US has to actually engage in real diplomacy, that's not such a bad thing. We will still be good allies, it's just that you won't get the same access you had before. This will not harm the relationship between our countries.

Anyway - the future you mentioned is certain to be the case now. When the cables were leaked, it became certain that documents will be more highly classified from now on. People won't be so free to talk, or if they are, they'll be a lot more careful about the records.

You're right, I don't think this'll do much between Australia and the US but I was thinking of the more generalized aspect, with other countries that we aren't so close to or other countries where it would look bad for the leadership to appear friendly with the US, such as countries in the Middle East (whose support we desire).

I don't mean to pick on you specifically but I've seen this plea to think of the poor, innocent merchants floated several times. However, PayPal/Mastercard/Visa's processing networks were completely unaffected by the attacks on their websites...so really, what's the big deal? Seems to me like this is the digital version of a protest march. It's a temporary nuisance, but really there's nothing to see here.

And Wikileaks != anonymous. I'm not sure that anyone has ever really considered anonymous to be a noble organization.

The part that was DDOS does affect merchants because it was the secure code site, which requires someone buying something to authenticate before the purchase will go through. So while the processing network may have been unaffected, transactions were blocked from taking place.

I did make the separation between the site and their supporters. How do you know that no one from wikileaks didn't have a hand in it? Even if they did not have a hand in it, they have not spoke out against it that I am aware of.

I'm glad the kid got caught. Any time a small group of people decides on their own what the rest of the world will be able to read/hear/access, it pisses me off.

Horse pucky. I don't disagree with your premise, but this is a 16 year old kid. Somebody provided him with a tool to participate in a DOS, and he thought he was doing the right thing by installing it. For a 16-year old, this "crime" warrants about a day or two of after school detention, if that.

The adults who are behind the DOS will walk on this because they're not easy targets, and they're smart enough to deny involvement if contacted by the authorities. Oh, DOS attack? Sorry, I'll update my antivirus. It's just like the RIAA and MPAA - they catch grandma with 3 tunes her grandchildren download and they push her face into the dirt, while the guy who's running a plant pressing counterfeit DVDs is driving around in his Mercedes.

So US diplomacy suffers. . . . If the US has to actually engage in real diplomacy, that's not such a bad thing.

The US, because of its position on the world stage, acts as a mediator between hostiles states. E.g. South Korea and North Korea, Palestine and Israel, Iran and the Arab countries. Assange's stated goal is to harm the diplomatic process. To the extent that he has done so, it makes it more difficult for the US to broker deals between those parties.

Remember during the build up to the Iraq war progressives were calling for a diplomatic solution to the WMD problem? Why is it that all of a sudden we forget that diplomacy is absolutely vital to avoid armed conflict? Assange's vision of the world isn't an information-sharing utopia. It is a world where countries distrust each other. It is a world where diplomacy breaks down all the time and armed conflict is the result.

You're kidding, right?

Do you think that sort of diplomacy will be affected in the slightest?

Wikileaks will drive dodgy diplomacy underground. That's probably already happened. Actual, real diplomacy of mediating between aggressive states will still occur, and the talks will still be highly classified (as they *always* were). The difference is that the offhand summaries that might be made and sent around will be very carefully worded or highly classified as well.

There will be no change on that front.

As for Assange's vision... well, whether that's true or not, he cannot make it happen through leaks. Stop the paranoid fantasy that leaked diplomatic documents will lead to the total breakdown of diplomacy. That will only happen if all the world's leaders and diplomats take stupid pills at the same time.

People have too much to gain from diplomacy to toss the concept out the window. People, even politicians, are not that stupid.

So, the next time I give you money to buy milk and you go and buy marijuana illegally instead, I should be responsible? No, it reflects poorly on me that I trusted you and it looks bad for the government to be paying these fools who are tossing around money for crap like this (which is reprehensible), but it's not illegal on the government's part.

The State Department helped cover it up after the fact. And, it was a crime they knew about, did nothing, and continued to employ the perpetrators. This is the most reprehensible thing I've seen in a while. As far as I'm concerned, everyone involved, including the US government officials who helped cover it up after the fact, should be buried up to their chests and stoned by the innocent victims.

So, the next time I give you money to buy milk and you go and buy marijuana illegally instead, I should be responsible? No, it reflects poorly on me that I trusted you and it looks bad for the government to be paying these fools who are tossing around money for crap like this (which is reprehensible), but it's not illegal on the government's part.

The State Department helped cover it up after the fact. And, it was a crime they knew about, did nothing, and continued to employ the perpetrators. This is the most reprehensible thing I've seen in a while. As far as I'm concerned, everyone involved, including the US government officials who helped cover it up after the fact, should be buried up to their chests and stoned by the innocent victims.

The State Department helped cover it up? Look, it sounds like you're very upset about this and rightfully so, but that doesn't mean you get to make stuff up. Nowhere in that article (or the cable itself) does it say the State Department did any sort of cover up, nor did the diplomat who wrote the cable suggest such action be taken. It says that the Afghan Interior Minister wanted the US to "quash" the report. Also, the Afghan men who participated in the incident were arrested and punished, the DynCorp leaders were "disciplined" (whatever that means, probably not enough for my tastes), and the Minister also acknowledges there are "'wonderful' people working hard" at DynCorp (they're not all evil, to be sure).

It's reprehensible, it's disgusting, but you need to keep the facts straight. Your proposed State Department coverup has no evidence to support it. Should the government continue to employ those people? No, I don't think so, but I don't get to make those decisions unfortunately

Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage.

The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial "Copenhagen accord", the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.

Not a crime and frankly the US should be doing everything it can to get people on board with climate change policy. It is the single biggest threat in our foreseeable future.

That jaja you've been smoking is leaving holes in your brain. You've been brainwashed by Obama's hallelujah chorus..

**WTF** with ding-dongs on?? The USA mounted an offensive to stop the EU's and developing countries' screams of outrage because the USA decided to ignore the treaty the EU and the UN had been working on for years, and set up private bilateral discussions with China, separate from the Summit, of which resulted an absolutely useless and defanged "Copenhagen Declaration" that had piss-all to do with the original objectives of the Summit, and which the USA strong-armed several countries (which had much bigger objectives in mind) to accept..

and which the USA strong-armed several countries (which had much bigger objectives in mind) to accept..

Did you even read the article? It took many bribes and threats just to get countries reluctant to address global warming to sign off on the accord. I can't imagine what the US would've had to do to get something better.

I don't know what his goal is (it could just be masturbation) but what many people supporting Wikileaks are against is unneccessary secrecy in government (including diplomats), not against government or diplomacy itself.

All the people who are trying to say that reduced secrecy hurts government and diplomacy have offered nothing but handwaving arguments or assertions without any arguments at all. Stuff like...."this makes US diplomacy more difficult, which is bad". Where's the evidence that this makes US diplomacy more difficult and what is the definition of "bad"?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------And to those who are taking the leaks about the Cancun Accords to mean that the US was doing something positive by getting people behind it..... the Cancun Accords were simply an argeement to do nothing.

It circumvented the entire point of Cancun Meeting, which was to set legally binding targets to reduce carbon emissions. All the behind the scenes bribery was aimed at fulfilling the political need to demonstrate "broad support" for an accord that committed to doing nothing about global warming! Nothing other than just talk. The Obama adminsitration, like the Bush administration before it, actively worked to prevent climate change mitigation. Obama just dressed it up with the pretty words he's famous for.

You're crediting the NSA with some level of intelligence here. I'm willing to bet that behind closed doors these organisations are run just as badly as any company you've ever worked at.

To be realistic, IF the NSA was behind the DDoS attacks, they will never be caught. It's very easy to hide your identity in this sort of attack (which is why you only ever hear about teenage kids being arrested for it) and even if they didn't no one would dare bring them in for it.

Oh, agreed. I was talking about the suggestions that they might hire the kid. Someone pointed out that he probably just ran a script and they wouldn't hire him unless there was some actual intelligence shown, but to be honest, I'm not counting on their hiring officers necessarily knowing the difference.

That said, picking the wrong side in this has probably taken him off the 'eligible' list for that one.

As for the arrested teenager, he has already confessed to being part of the attacks on Visa and MasterCard, according to Dutch authorities. The investigation is ongoing, though, because a larger group is "probably" involved. We're going to go out on a limb and say that a single arrest won't put a stop to the actions of that larger group.

I might not count on it. The vast majority of Anon are hardly committed to the cause, and are just in it for the lulz and notoriety of being part of Anon. If it can be demonstrated that there are actual criminal consequences to their actions, the membership might dry up pretty quickly. At least it will probably shorten Anon's attention span a little bit more and encourage them to move on to safer targets, like aging glam-rock stars.

Australia's state broadcaster, the ABC reports that a lawyer for Julian Assange said, after meeting the WikiLeaks founder in jail on Thursday, that he wants to make it clear that he did not ask for cyber attacks on companies that stopped doing business with his organization. Jennifer Robinson told the ABC, Mr Assange "is, of course, very frustrated to be held in prison." She added:

"He is also very concerned that he is unable to respond to the various malicious allegations that have been made against him ... [allegations] that he somehow instructed hackers around the world to attack MasterCard and Visa for refusing WikiLeaks service. It is absolutely false. He did not make any such instruction, and indeed he sees that as a deliberate attempt to conflate hacking organizations [with] WikiLeaks, which is not a hacking organization. It is a news organization and a publisher."

Australia's state broadcaster, the ABC reports that a lawyer for Julian Assange said, after meeting the WikiLeaks founder in jail on Thursday, that he wants to make it clear that he did not ask for cyber attacks on companies that stopped doing business with his organization. Jennifer Robinson told the ABC, Mr Assange "is, of course, very frustrated to be held in prison." She added:

"He is also very concerned that he is unable to respond to the various malicious allegations that have been made against him ... [allegations] that he somehow instructed hackers around the world to attack MasterCard and Visa for refusing WikiLeaks service. It is absolutely false. He did not make any such instruction, and indeed he sees that as a deliberate attempt to conflate hacking organizations [with] WikiLeaks, which is not a hacking organization. It is a news organization and a publisher."

Interesting that he's more concerned about his own reputation rather than the actual conduct, which he does not criticize as is usually typical when one disclaims responsibility.

One of the WikiLeaks documents exposed U.S. taxpayer-funded private military contractor DynCorp's involvement in child sex slavery in Afghanistan. Even worse, the same mercenary corp is a repeat offender, having profited from child slavery previously in Bosnia. There was a damn Hollywood movie made about it!

Yet the American government continued to hire them for mercenary duties.

And here we have a 16-year-old arrested for using a script to repeatedly access a credit card site.

Are they even going to try and find those responsible for the attack on Wikileaks?

Oh wait, Wikileaks aren't a massive company with lots of money. Makes sense.

And then they get outraged when called fascist state...

My God, if the Netherlands and Sweden of all places are fascist states, then that term has lost all meaning.

If you actually look around in both countries you will see that it's exact definition of the fascist state. Politicians in the bed with corporations against the people (popularly known as sheep). Democracy is the word that has lost it's meaning completely as there is nothing of the sort in the west. China is probably closer to having government working for the good of the people than all the west put together.

Whoa. Put down the glue there, those fumes aren't good for you. I suppose you also think Myanmar and zimbabwe are thriving democracies. Would you call throwing parents in jail for protesting shoddy school construction that led to the deaths of their children in an earthquake taking care of the people? Oh. I get it. Take care of them. Like the mobsters say when they want someone in concrete boots. That's it.http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?it ... ubcatid=65

I don't mean to pick on you specifically but I've seen this plea to think of the poor, innocent merchants floated several times. However, PayPal/Mastercard/Visa's processing networks were completely unaffected by the attacks on their websites...so really, what's the big deal? Seems to me like this is the digital version of a protest march. It's a temporary nuisance, but really there's nothing to see here.

And Wikileaks != anonymous. I'm not sure that anyone has ever really considered anonymous to be a noble organization.

The part that was DDOS does affect merchants because it was the secure code site, which requires someone buying something to authenticate before the purchase will go through. So while the processing network may have been unaffected, transactions were blocked from taking place.

I did make the separation between the site and their supporters. How do you know that no one from wikileaks didn't have a hand in it? Even if they did not have a hand in it, they have not spoke out against it that I am aware of.

I'd have to second this comment. I was trying to book my wife a flight to Japan to visit her family, but the transaction kept failing at the verification process, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why.

In the end, I had to use a foreign debit card to buy the ticket -- which means I had to then transfer money to an overseas account to cover the charge, losing money on the transaction and exchange rate. It was likely only 50 or so US dollars lost, but still, that is money out of my pocket...and I am no enemy of Wikileaks.

All they really needed to do to show solidarity was to provide a large number of mirror sites for Wikileaks. That would have shown support for the site, rather than a disregard for others.

Australia's state broadcaster, the ABC reports that a lawyer for Julian Assange said, after meeting the WikiLeaks founder in jail on Thursday, that he wants to make it clear that he did not ask for cyber attacks on companies that stopped doing business with his organization. Jennifer Robinson told the ABC, Mr Assange "is, of course, very frustrated to be held in prison." She added:

"He is also very concerned that he is unable to respond to the various malicious allegations that have been made against him ... [allegations] that he somehow instructed hackers around the world to attack MasterCard and Visa for refusing WikiLeaks service. It is absolutely false. He did not make any such instruction, and indeed he sees that as a deliberate attempt to conflate hacking organizations [with] WikiLeaks, which is not a hacking organization. It is a news organization and a publisher."

Interesting that he's more concerned about his own reputation rather than the actual conduct, which he does not criticize as is usually typical when one disclaims responsibility.

Read the text again. The statement was made by a lawyer on his behalf, and like all lawyers, they've carefully neutered the statement to be factually correct but very short on anything else. A lawyer will not come out and criticise an organisation, they're more careful than that.

Your post reminds me of an interview I saw on TV last night. The talking head said, completely unprompted that while Assange had some extreme views and was under arrest for sexual molestation, the Wikileaks case has to be considered on its own merits. That preamble created a strong connection in the mind of a viewer that there is a lot wrong with Assange, and helps prejudice them against him while the speaker simultaneously pretended to be supporting Wikileaks. Factually, there's nothing wrong with it, but it creates a strong impression.

So US diplomacy suffers. . . . If the US has to actually engage in real diplomacy, that's not such a bad thing.

The US, because of its position on the world stage, acts as a mediator between hostiles states. E.g. South Korea and North Korea, Palestine and Israel, Iran and the Arab countries. Assange's stated goal is to harm the diplomatic process. To the extent that he has done so, it makes it more difficult for the US to broker deals between those parties.

Remember during the build up to the Iraq war progressives were calling for a diplomatic solution to the WMD problem? Why is it that all of a sudden we forget that diplomacy is absolutely vital to avoid armed conflict? Assange's vision of the world isn't an information-sharing utopia. It is a world where countries distrust each other. It is a world where diplomacy breaks down all the time and armed conflict is the result.

So the US has lost all credibility, because at the end of the day, it's been shown to not deserve to have any credibility. Yup.

I'll just point out that Assange isn't the one killing US credibility, the actions of the US are. Assange is only showing the world what the truth of the matter is. If the truth is that the US cannot be trusted, then I don't see a problem with countries not trusting the US.

As to your examples, I hadn't been seeing much (any) progress with DPRK/South Korea, or Israel/Palestine, or Iran/Arab states, even before this Wikileaks fiasco, so even that argument fails on face value.

I don't mean to pick on you specifically but I've seen this plea to think of the poor, innocent merchants floated several times. However, PayPal/Mastercard/Visa's processing networks were completely unaffected by the attacks on their websites...so really, what's the big deal? Seems to me like this is the digital version of a protest march. It's a temporary nuisance, but really there's nothing to see here.

And Wikileaks != anonymous. I'm not sure that anyone has ever really considered anonymous to be a noble organization.

The part that was DDOS does affect merchants because it was the secure code site, which requires someone buying something to authenticate before the purchase will go through. So while the processing network may have been unaffected, transactions were blocked from taking place.

I did make the separation between the site and their supporters. How do you know that no one from wikileaks didn't have a hand in it? Even if they did not have a hand in it, they have not spoke out against it that I am aware of.

None of your arguments make a shred of difference. If a corrupt company is taken down because the Board of Directors have been scamming the investors and shareholders, then the customers will suffer too. None of that changes the fact that such a company should be taken down.

Not so extreme in the Paypal/Amazon/Visa/Mastercard cases, but the principle remains the same - the companies are the target of protest, and of course targeting a company will hurt its customers.

Taking your argument on face value, I assume you've also written to the State Department and the DoD protesting the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, considering the US Military's very public acceptance of the inevitability of collateral damage?

If a corrupt company is taken down because the Board of Directors have been scamming the investors and shareholders, then the customers will suffer too. None of that changes the fact that such a company should be taken down.

Err, no, unless you really love retributive justice. Here in the civilized world, we prefer the executives to repay their shareholders, and perhaps serve some jail time. We certainly don't want the company to be "taken down." Though it's true that sometimes the fraud is so extensive and damaging, the company goes bankrupt regardless (see Enron).

So the US has lost all credibility, because at the end of the day, it's been shown to not deserve to have any credibility. Yup.

The US has lost credibility in its ability to keep things private. Otherwise, the substance of the cables don't reall shows the US has no credibility. In fact, much of it shows the effectiveness of the diplomatic process. The vast majority of it is simply mundane.

Quote:

I'll just point out that Assange isn't the one killing US credibility, the actions of the US are. Assange is only showing the world what the truth of the matter is. If the truth is that the US cannot be trusted, then I don't see a problem with countries not trusting the US.

Uh, other nations give US diplomats their honest assessment about things because, though they expect them to be written down and communicated to superiors, they do not expect those communications to be released. So, yes, it is Assange (well, more like Manning) who has hurt US credibility.

Quote:

As to your examples, I hadn't been seeing much (any) progress with DPRK/South Korea, or Israel/Palestine, or Iran/Arab states, even before this Wikileaks fiasco, so even that argument fails on face value.

The lack of any serious armed conflict is a success on its own. But here's a more cogent example: China and Taiwan.

That is not scamming investors and shareholders, unless Pfizer ends up being prosecuted under the laws of Nigeria (it doesn't look like an FCPA case to me) and are punished with a fine or something worse, hurting their business. In which case, some shareholder will sue the board under US securities law. We certainly wouldn't want to shut down all of Pfizer just for this one thing, unless you're a Neanderthal.

Well, it sucks for 3000_21 and whatever small % of Visa and Mastercard's customers that those companies decided to play politics and now they're suffering from a little bit of blowback. At any rate, Mastercard doesn't seem all that concerned:

MasterCard has made significant progress in restoring full-service to its corporate website. Our core processing capabilities have not been compromised and cardholder account data has not been placed at risk. While we have seen limited interruption in some web-based services, cardholders can continue to use their cards for secure transactions globally.

I just don't get all of this bloviating about DDoS attacks from Anon and script kiddies. Do you all really think that they're some sort of threat? Aren't you concerned at all that our government can single out a media organization and then lean on private companies to gut their operations?

I guess in the back of my mind I've always known that the Internet was not really as open as it seems (see AT&T and Quantico). But the sheer brazenness of this attack on our ideals of free speech is shocking, as is the general non-reaction to it all. I mean, dammit, if we can't get this right then how can we expect others to do so? I don't always agree with our policies, but freedom of press is a core principle of democracy. The secretary of defense doesn't even think these leaks are that big of a deal! The president is a freakin' constitutional law professor!

Quote:

“Now, I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets. Many governments — some governments — deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation.

“So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another.

“Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.’’

Horse pucky. I don't disagree with your premise, but this is a 16 year old kid. Somebody provided him with a tool to participate in a DOS, and he thought he was doing the right thing by installing it. For a 16-year old, this "crime" warrants about a day or two of after school detention, if that.

Bullshit. DDoS attacks are a criminal offence for a good reason - some serious community service is indicated, plus a moderate fine. Regardless what I think about the issue, DDoS attacks are not justified and in many cases are an attack on free speech in and of themselves.

It's also more fuel for the fire Assange is stoking under Governments to ramp up web censorship. (And that's ALL that's happening "for freedom" as a result...)

Look, the script kiddies running the LOIC didn't realize that all they have to do is look at the IP addresses that are attacking, pull out any that resolve to physically near the investigators, then scoop up the low hanging fruit. A lot of these script kiddies don't realize that, just like torrents, you aren't anonymous when doing this, you are broadcasting your IP address, which means you might as well be broadcasting your physical address. Unlike a botnet where the individual IP's are innocent and just guilty of poor security, the LOIC is run by volunteers, so each IP address resolves to someone who is breaking the law. You don't need to arrest all of them, just a few to make an example of.

After this story has gone out, I bet you more then half the LOIC users shut it down, uninstalled it, dleted it, and reset their routers hoping to get a new IP address (protip: it's too late).

The ones who don't are the real protesters. Just like the old time sit ins, you are risking being arrested in order to disrupt business and get the issue to the public eye. It's good to stand behind your ideals, but most of the ones who do that don't have resposibilities, jobs that they could lose for that kind of foolishness, mortgages and children to take care of.

This is still a war, a war with points on both sides, neither side is absolute evil, and neither side is absolutely in the right. I figure things will come to a head when someone breaks the encryption on his failsafe, he has nothing protecting him anymore, gets assassinated and the documents in the failsafe gets realeased. Basically a lose for everyone involved.

PS: For the poster who linked theintelhub.com, I got as far as "...the real enemies, most notably the offshore banking cartel that is actively working towards the destruction of our beloved Constitution in order to implement a tyrannical world government." before I couldn't read it any more. Does the site ship tin foil hats, or do you have to make your own?

PPS: the Jester (screw the leetspeak) is obviously working for the government, or is 12 with a mentally unstable military father figure. It's all too... Hackers. It's like the bianary explosive fiasco, the government can't tell fact from fiction, even the fiction they write themselves. It just doesn't seem like a real hacker would act that way. More likely it is a CIA or NSA opperative trying to behave the way that Hollywood has portrayed hackers.

Real quick, to the people who think that the kid is going to get hired by a government agency, or are talking about "hackers": it takes no skill to participate in a DDoS attack. I could teach my grandmother with Alzheimer's to do it in ten minutes. I'd bet only a handful of the people involved actually have any knowledge of how to write a program like the LOIC (which isn't hard to do), much less could be categorized as "hackers."

The kid is not the one who really needs to be prosecuted, though; the organizers of the attack are the ones who need to be affected for any impact to be made. The kid is sixteen, he probably thought it would be cool to participate. Sixteen-year-olds are stupid, and do stupid things for terrible reasons. Put the fear of god into him, send him on his way. Find the asshats who think it's fun to screw with vital services, and actually spend your

Good ...so when are we going to see people arrested for DDOSing the Wikileaks site? Or is DDOSing only illegal when you target the powers that be?

Ironically, Wikileaks doesn't want to be transparent and values its own privacy, so except for Assange everyone behind the website remains anonymous. Which makes it difficult for them to press charges against people that are DDoSing them.

hey so I know this is bad to ask and I may get trouble for posting this (being that we live in a fascist society and all) but lets say that I'm not ok with the govs of US and UK, etc violating freedom of speech, due process, rule of law, etc... lets say that I am interested in supporting 4chan or "Anonymous".... how would I go about doing this ???

hey so I know this is bad to ask and I may get trouble for posting this (being that we live in a fascist society and all) but lets say that I'm not ok with the govs of US and UK, etc violating freedom of speech, due process, rule of law, etc... lets say that I am interested in supporting 4chan or "Anonymous".... how would I go about doing this ???

Are they even going to try and find those responsible for the attack on Wikileaks?

Oh wait, Wikileaks aren't a massive company with lots of money. Makes sense.

And then they get outraged when called fascist state...

My God, if the Netherlands and Sweden of all places are fascist states, then that term has lost all meaning.

If you actually look around in both countries you will see that it's exact definition of the fascist state. Politicians in the bed with corporations against the people (popularly known as sheep). Democracy is the word that has lost it's meaning completely as there is nothing of the sort in the west. China is probably closer to having government working for the good of the people than all the west put together.

I was going to say that for what it's worth, the Netherlands seem to be sliding further and further to the right, politically speaking. More and more highly educated and supposedly intelligent people are more and more often starting to spout racist nonsense and actually believe it.

But that's racism, not fascism, as you insist. I can kind of see where you're coming from with the "governments in bed with corporations" being part of the definition of fascism. But corporations being forced and indeed set up to work to do a dictator's bidding isn't quite the same as corporations lobbying and holding its own diplomatic relations with the government to steer what the government is doing, which is what you seem to be implying. The latter is not fascism. It is, as far as I can tell from my comfy armchair with no actual insight, partly how the US government works. But not the Dutch government, nor, still from the same armchair, the Swedish government.